I think the reason it works is far fewer tags with "x" in them. When you type the first letter, a database is fetching all the tags with that letter. Most first letters ( e, a and t would be the worst) return many thousands or tens of thousands of tags. I've tried "qq" as the first two dummy letters, that works for me also.

I don't see this problem when I'm on my Windows PC. Sounds like an OS thing, all the devices mentioned here (Android, iOS, Kindle OS) I think are all flavors of linux and all descendants of UNIX. It would be interesting to hear from other imgflip users who have BSD, Ubuntu, etc. machines/devices and whether they see the same problem, whether starting with two dummy letters is a solution.

It was slow on my win10 box, sometimes painfully slow, but it's consistently bad on my Droid. I haven't noticed any other calls to databases being as slow on this site or others. It feels like bad code. My preferences would be to have limited drop down choices and just let me type the rest. There is no need for any tag ever created with the letter t, th, the, etc... To have to be searched, especially when there are people like me who enjoy making silly custom tags :)

I would probably have missed that... Thanks for letting me know it featured. There is a place for imgflip tips and tricks, inside imgflip.com/m/community_based. Can I have your permission to add this meme there for other users who have the same problem down the road?